Akhemian Roads
Like a vast serpent slithering across the plains, through forests, and around hills, networks of elevated stone roadways mark the landscape. These Akemian roads, as they are today referred to in memory of their purported inventor, once served as rapid transportation for the goods and warriors of the Istragan Empire.
Like so much of the Empire's technology, the roads remain mysterious to us. Certainly they cannot have been meant merely as a surface on which people and wagons might move. If so, why elevate them off the ground, and besides there are plenty of ancient imperial roads built on the ground, so what purpose did these roads serve on their elevated paths across the Empire?
The main theory put forward by the scholars of Emberhold is that the Akhemian roads served as a path on which special vehicles could move. They were not for walking or riding or drawing carts along like bridges over land. The surfaces of the roads - even accounting for the wear of so many years - are not fit for draft animals. Instead, some form of magical power must have propelled the vehicles along the roads. Though much of his has been salvaged no, the roads once had large amounts of tekros and cobalt in the construction of their surfaces. As most of that material has been stripped, it is impossible to examine its intended placement along the surface to divine the precise function. Nonetheless the presence of these magically resonant materials in such quantities must mean that the roads were magical. On this evidence, the summaries in the Emberhold Archive posit that huge carts were propelled along the roads without the aid of any animal. The possible ruins of such carts have occasionally been found, but as they seem to have been made mostly of wood, little is left for us to examine. We cannot say whether the carts had pilots or whether magical spells guided the entire process without direct intervention.
Like so much of imperial technology, today the Akhemian Roads are little more than a source of salvage for metal and cut stone for the building of other things.
Like so much of the Empire's technology, the roads remain mysterious to us. Certainly they cannot have been meant merely as a surface on which people and wagons might move. If so, why elevate them off the ground, and besides there are plenty of ancient imperial roads built on the ground, so what purpose did these roads serve on their elevated paths across the Empire?
The main theory put forward by the scholars of Emberhold is that the Akhemian roads served as a path on which special vehicles could move. They were not for walking or riding or drawing carts along like bridges over land. The surfaces of the roads - even accounting for the wear of so many years - are not fit for draft animals. Instead, some form of magical power must have propelled the vehicles along the roads. Though much of his has been salvaged no, the roads once had large amounts of tekros and cobalt in the construction of their surfaces. As most of that material has been stripped, it is impossible to examine its intended placement along the surface to divine the precise function. Nonetheless the presence of these magically resonant materials in such quantities must mean that the roads were magical. On this evidence, the summaries in the Emberhold Archive posit that huge carts were propelled along the roads without the aid of any animal. The possible ruins of such carts have occasionally been found, but as they seem to have been made mostly of wood, little is left for us to examine. We cannot say whether the carts had pilots or whether magical spells guided the entire process without direct intervention.
Like so much of imperial technology, today the Akhemian Roads are little more than a source of salvage for metal and cut stone for the building of other things.
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